Black Gate

Strangeness has many vectors; you can be weird in multiple directions at once. Whichever shape a movie takes, it’s often a good idea to have something strange in it. Something unexpected. You can usually count on movies at Fantasia to have at least one well-developed kind of weirdness in them, but the last two movies I saw on July 19, both at the large Hall Theatre, went in very different directions; one the strangest film (in a certain way) that I’d see this year, and the other imagining a world in which there is nothing unpredictable at all. The first was an odd Hollywood-set detective story, Under the Silver Lake. The second was Laplace’s Witch, an adaptation of a Japanese science-fiction novel, directed by Takashi Miike.

Under the Silver Lake is directed by David Robert Mitchell, whose previous film It Follows was a surprise hit. This is very different from that quiet teen horror film; Silver Lake follows Sam (Andrew Garfield), an unemployed 33-year-old who spies on his female neighbours and has no obvious ambitions for his life. Somehow he attracts a new neighbour (Riley Keough), who promptly disappears. Sam’s half-assed attempt to find her leads him to a loopy world defined by stream-of-consciousness conspiracy theory. There are eccentric minicomics zines that hold the key to a murderous ghoul; a killer of dogs; a king of the homeless; secret messages in pop songs; clues hidden in an old issue of Nintendo Power; parties in assorted strange locations with assorted strange people; multiple trinities of women; and secrets underlying the geography of Los Angeles.

This film’s a maze, in which everything refers to everything else, and occasionally to things outside of the film. It’s about, among other things, a kind of search for profundity in popular culture, and how that search is doomed to failure. It’s about the anomie of a generation of young men. It’s about voyeurism, and women performing for the male gaze, intentionally and unintentionally. It’s about 140 minutes long (to paraphrase one overrated pop singer), but it feels longer, if only because of its intentionally episodic and elliptical structure. It’s sporadically funny, but not really a comedy. It sporadically provides clues, but is only nominally a mystery. It is consistently very well-shot, and very precise in its compositions and mise-en-scene. Mainly, though, what it is, is weird.

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The first movie I saw at Fantasia on Thursday, July 19, was at the J.A. De Sève Theatre, a Korean film called The Fortress (Namhansanseong, 남한산성). Based on a novel by Hoon Kim, Dong-hyuk Hwang wrote the screenplay and directed his own adaptation. It’s a historical war story, set in 1636 when the Chinese Qing dynasty invaded Joseon-ruled Korea. The royal court has to flee before the Qing armies, taking refuge in a mountain castle, the fortress of the title. The Qing besiege the place, and the film follows what happens in the fortress as a result. More precisely, it follows the dispute between two of the officials of King Injo (Hae-il Park): on the one hand Myeong-gil Choi (Byung-hun Lee, who was in RED 2 and was Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe movies), the Interior Minister who wants to negotiate with the Qing and if necessary surrender; and on the other, Sang-heon Kim (Yoon-seok Kim), the Minister of Rites who wants to hold out until the end, believing that an army’s gathering in the south that will strike north and relieve the fortress.

A blacksmith (Soo Go, The Royal Tailor) from a nearby village conscripted to serve as a soldier is the voice of the common man, while Prime Minster Ryu Kim (Song Young-chang, Kundo: Age of the Rampant) schemes to maintain his place and refuses to consider surrender. Class conflicts develop, as the court tries to keep the soldiers in line while allotting them the barest minimum of supplies needed to survive a harsh winter. Meanwhile conflicts among the court are a mix of show and threat, ministers alternately genuflecting to the King and calling for each others’ heads.

At its heart, though, this movie is about the dispute between Choi and Kim. The key is that both are honourable men, and both have deep principles informing their positions on the war. They respect each other, by and large, but are utterly opposed — with the Prime Minister a kind of wild card in their conflict. The difference between the two men is established from the very opening scenes of the movie. Choi goes alone on horseback to negotiate with the Qing, and does not flinch when they launch a flight of arrows that fall purposely just short of his mount: this establishes he’s a brave man, which we need to understand to grasp that his desire for negotiation doesn’t come from personal cowardice. Then we see a ferryman lead Kim across an icy lake to the fortress, and observe fatalistically that on the next day he’ll do the same for the Qing. Kim responds by killing him, establishing his ruthlessness but also his determination to save Joseon’s independence.

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The only film I planned to see on Wednesday, July 18 was called Cam. Directed by Daniel Goldhaber from a script written by Isa Mazzei, it tells the story of a woman named Alice (Madeline Brewer, of The Handmaid’s Tale and Orange is the New Black) who works as an erotic webcam performer under the name of Lola — until she finds her account stolen by parties unknown. As Alice investigates she finds it’s more than just her financial information or identity that’s been stolen; someone who looks and sounds exactly like her is performing as Lola in her place, and this Lola is breaking all the rules Alice established for herself as a performer. Alice investigates and tries to regain control of her life, driving the story toward a brutal conclusion.

The first thing that must be said about this film is that it is structured perfectly. It’s only 94 minutes long, but it gets across a lot of information and introduces us to a lot of characters — Alice’s friends and rivals among her co-workers; some of her customers; and her family (who don’t know what she does for a living). The plot’s laser sharp: we spend the first third learning about Alice’s life as a performer, getting to understand the environment, and seeing how she plans her shows for the sake of getting her clients to give her tokens which move her up the ranking of women on the webcam service. Then she loses control of her account, and has to find out what’s going on, and her actions are exactly what you’d expect — talking to her friends, suspecting her rivals, trying to deal with the company, trying to report her problems to the cops (who don’t understand, and one of whom tries to hit on her). This is a mystery, and her investigation gets more and more desperate, setting up the final third of the film in which there’s another slight shift of genre as Alice finds out what’s happening and tries to deal with it. The ending’s unexpected, tense, and thoroughly solid.

It is probably worth noting — as it was in the Fantasia program — that Mazzei’s a former camgirl, meaning that she’s writing from a place of knowledge. Issues relevant to sex workers (as when Alice’s family finds out what she does, and the consequences that follow from that) are used well, and the depiction of Alice’s job is appropriately everyday: it’s a job, with things she likes and things she doesn’t, and some co-workers she gets along with and some she doesn’t, and regular customers good and bad, and all the rest of it. I don’t think the film’s especially celebratory of the work, but one does get a bit of a sense of why Alice keeps at it: she has an outlet for her creativity and performative drive.

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